AT&T saves 2 million work hours annually by adopting API-led connectivity

Challenge

Overhauling the integration strategy

AT&T Inc. is the world’s largest telecommunications company and the second largest provider of mobile telephone services. AT&T subscribers expect the sales and service teams to sign them up quickly and turn on the service fast. However, before MuleSoft, AT&T's legacy systems inhibited effective management of the customer experience. Multiple systems were connected via point-to-point (P2P) integrations making it difficult to access and share data.

The main problem is that AT&T lacked a single source of truth — one integrated platform that ensures customers have a common experience as they move through the sales and support process. Simple customer interactions were challenging because service agents needed data from more than 50 separate systems during a single call. This resulted in long wait times, slow time to resolution, and wide-spread customer dissatisfaction. It also hindered the company’s ability to sell relevant products and services to their customers.

Objectives

Improving the customer experience through digital transformation

AT&T needed to modernize the digital experience for customers and service/sales team members by:

Replacing P2P connections with API-based integrations.
Aggregating customer information from 50+ systems of record into one holistic, scalable, and secure solution.
Establishing a unified, seamless view across all customer interactions.
Providing 9,000 Mobility Services and Support agents with systems powered by Salesforce and MuleSoft to help manage call interactions with 180 million customers.

Solution

Connecting 50+ systems across the enterprise with APIs

To support its digital transformation objectives, AT&T deployed the Salesforce Customer 360 platform powered by Salesforce clouds (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud) and MuleSoft. AT&T also built a Business Sales CRM Platform on Salesforce to enable the sales team to view customer data and recommend actions or upsell opportunities.

AT&T used MuleSoft to build, deploy, manage, and share more than 50 APIs that connect Salesforce Customer C360 to the many legacy systems holding valuable data. Leveraging API-led connectivity to unlock data from the previous sales and service support systems, AT&T eliminated the need for the service teams to log into 50+ different systems to find the information they need to serve the customers. Instead, they access a single Salesforce platform to resolve all customer issues.

Using MuleSoft, AT&T also built APIs enabling common services such as logging, exception handling, event notification and reporting frameworks. In addition, CloudHub Platform Operationalization and Security Patterns for all API transactions improved AT&T's security posture and increased governance over data access. MuleSoft also enabled automated performance testing and deployments using CI/CD and headless testing for APIs.

MuleSoft enabled AT&T to build future-proof APIs that are compliant to the TMF Open API specification, a standard for API interoperability and portability to enable end-to-end seamless connectivity across complex digital services. Compliance with this standard empowers AT&T to integrate Salesforce with any future systems.

“At the heart of our new Salesforce implementation is MuleSoft,” explains Brad Ringer, Principal Solution Engineer at AT&T. “MuleSoft is our integration layer. To complete any APIs, data, or batch processes, we’re using MuleSoft. We’ve implemented a solution that really meets our requirements to provide connectivity in and out of the internal network to Salesforce. And it’s extensible for our future needs.”

AT&T is also able to reuse the same APIs as they add new products. So far AT&T has built 30+ reusable integrations with 75% reuse. For customer accounts, products, billing and payments, orders, Salesforce case creation, Salesforce data extraction, and data sync with Einstein Analytics.

million work hours saved annually

8 X

faster time to market

75 %

API reuse

Results

Saving 2 million work hours every year with API-led connectivity

MuleSoft API-led connectivity has streamlined and fortified customer support across all channels at AT&T. By integrating systems via APIs instead of P2P connections, and connecting Salesforce to multiple legacy systems, AT&T reduced the time it takes service reps to access customer data, enabling them to provide a better customer experience.

AT&T also accelerated time to market for new products. While it previously took a year to onboard a new product, now it takes 6 weeks thanks to MuleSoft and API reuse. Each time AT&T introduces a new product, the company is able to reuse the APIs that were already built. Currently, AT&T offers 120 different products that have been built with the support of API-based integration.

The result of MuleSoft is that we reduced the time our teams are doing administrative tasks,” Ringer adds. “MuleSoft saves each of our teams 30 minutes a day, which over the course of a year is more than 2 million work hours to focus on what they do best — helping our customers.

Brad Ringer

Principal Solution Engineer, AT&T